Description
National Visions, National Blindness: Canadian Art and Identities in the 1920s by Leslie Dawn is the Winner, 2008 Klibanksy Prize, The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. National Visions, National Blindness traces the development of this Group of Seven landscapes program and illuminates its conflicted history. Using newly discovered archival evidence, Leslie Dawn revises common interpretations of several well-known events and rescues others from obscurity. He problematizes conventional perceptions of the Group as a national school and underscores the contradictions inherent in international exhibitions showing unpeopled landscapes alongside Northwest Coast Native arts and the "Indian" paintings of Langdon Kihn and Emily Carr. Dawn examines how this dichotomy forced a re-evaluation of the place of First Nations in both Canadian art and nationalism. Leslie Dawn is a professor in the Department of Art at the University of Lethbridge.